1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to targeted marketing, and in particular to systems and methods for personalizing marketing materials, advertisements, entertainment, educational materials, and other content to the individual preferences of Internet users.
2. Description of Related Art
Targeted marketing through the Internet is well known in the art. Individuals who navigate the World Wide Web (“Web”) portion of the Internet are frequently presented with advertisements, promotions, and other content (collectively “content”) targeted to their demographic and psychographic attributes, and other individual preferences and characteristics. In a typical scenario, an advertiser, promoter or other entity (collectively “content provider”) selects a set of target demographics and/or psychographics (“target profile”) for its content and makes the content accessible to Internet users through a Web site. The Web site operator, or another affiliated entity, maintains a user profile for each of its registered (or otherwise identifiable) users. Each user profile includes data fields for storing known attributes of its associated user, which may include name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, gender, age, race, and other personal information. When an individual accesses a Web site that includes a plurality of targeted content, the individual's user profile is compared against the target profile for the available targeted content, and the targeted content having a target profile that best fits the individual is displayed to the individual on the Web page.
The effectiveness of targeted marketing often depends on the quantity and quality of data collected for each user. For example, a primary source of user data is an online survey or questionnaire. Many Web sites require new users to establish an online profile before permitting access to certain Web pages or services. Each new user is prompted to provide the user's name, address, telephone number, gender, age, e-mail address and other demographic information. However, many users are reluctant to provide such private information over the Internet and set up “dummy” profiles with false data. Further, users are often reluctant to fill out a lengthy questionnaire that requires detailed answers, thus limiting the amount and type of information collected through this approach.
Additional user information is often collected by tracking the occurrence of certain user initiated events. For example, one common approach creates a log entry each time a user clicks through a displayed advertisement. Each user's online purchases made through the Web site may also be logged in the user profile. These events may be tracked through server-based programs and/or software executing on the user's computer. The data collected through these approaches is typically limited to a small subset of the user's actual online behavior, and attempts to correlate this behavioral data with user psychographics have proven to be inadequate.
In view of these and other limitations in the prior art, there is a need for a targeted marketing system and method that collects detailed and accurate user profile data and matches user profile data to target demographic and psychographic attributes in a meaningful manner. Further, there is a need for a way to use such collected data to create and provide advertisements, promotions or other content that will attract the user's attention.